Listening: "Crazy"

Pylon: Crazy
R.E.M.: Crazy

Two versions of the same song - Pylon's original and R.E.M.'s cover, both from way back in the early 1980s. I only know two Pylon songs (this one and "Look Alive", which I dubbed years ago off a college radio station broadcas) but on the strength of "Crazy" I think I'll dive into the band much further.

I probably wouldn't have ever heard Pylon at all were it not for the strong R.E.M. cover, which appeared on their early odds-and-ends LP Dead Letter Office. Both bands were from Athens, Georgia, and Michael Stipe's liner notes to Dead Letter Office relate how blown away he was by the first Pylon record, which made him relatively disappointed in his own band's first record (he didn't specify whether he meant R.E.M.'s first single, "Radio Free Europe", or their debut EP, Chronic Town). His disappointment in either of those great records is hard to comprehend, though it speaks very well for Pylon. Incidentally, please consider this a belated shout-out/buy-it recommendation for Dead Letter Office, the CD version of which also includes all of Chronic Town. Dead Letter Office is an oddball gem - besides "Crazy", there's three Velvet Underground covers, "Voice of Harold" (the instrumental backing of "Seven Chinese Brothers" recast with extemporaneous Stipe lyrics of him reading the liner notes to some gospel record), Aerosmith's "Toys in the Attic" (which the band liked well enough to play regularly in concert back in the early days), the band's drily funny "Bandwagon" (which surely deserved to be included on one of their regular album releases) and "Walter's Theme", a promo that they cut for a radio commercial for a BBQ joint, along with a bunch of other tunes that didn't make the regular-release cut but are still quite enjoyable. If you're a fan of early R.E.M., you really should have already heard and loved Dead Letter Office, but in case not, trust me when I say you will not be disappointed in this record.<br>